With more and more businesses heading full force into the arena of e-commerce, Internet marketing stands as the most effective- without exception- form of network marketing. Since traditional network marketing uses the “1 to many” (one person successfully reaching many with a given effort) marketing model, an Internet marketer can apply the trade very efficiently, and with extreme cost-effectiveness. With over 1.3 billion people shown to be online worldwide at any given time, the internet marketer’s ability to reach such a large market levels the “e-commerce” playing field for any business organization, regardless of size, that chooses to leverage the power of the Web itself to connect with a crowd of such magnitude. Indeed, the Web has experienced significant change as it’s become more recognized as a marketing channel of unparalleled effectiveness. There is no more effective way of connecting people and their ideas around one neighborhood as well as around the world.

Before the emergence of e-commerce, even companies intending to leverage the Web could not fully understand how powerful this medium would become, and so merely created web sites of a static nature. Imagine an electronic brochure, of sorts, providing insight into the company’s back story, their mission, line of product and services, and profiles of their leadership. As well, the researcher would often be given access to press releases and other miscellaneous company information. The sites were more graphics-intensive, with less concern for user navigability or interactivity.

As technology advanced at a rapid pace, so did the ability to actually conduct commerce online. As the Web developed, there came to be a realization on the part of marketers that the ability to keep site visitors engaged interactively created, then vastly increased, the ability to sell products and services online. The ability to retain visitors was called a site’s “stickiness”, and resulted in site usability quickly becoming the focus of emerging online entrepreneurs around the world.

Since even the most efficiently designed sites are useless when they’re invisible to the masses, success online was now interlaced directly to budgets available for driving online “traffic” to the site, most commonly through offline media efforts suck as broadcast ads, print, and even direct mail. Without a sizable marketing budget, a company’s competitors could find themselves at a severe disadvantage.

Enter the world of “Web 2.0”- a perceived second generation of web development and design that facilitated communication, secure sharing of information, user collaboration and interoperability on the World Wide Web. Traffic to an ever-increasing collection of sites dubbed “social media” began to increase exponentially during 2004, and suddenly the need for a sizable ad budget was no longer a dire necessity unto itself. Entrepreneurs who began to implement Web 2.0 marketing tactics no longer relied on static (corporate) sites as the key to a marketing strategy. Instead, the website could now be woven into a web of supporting tactics and tools used to drive traffic to one of any number of revenue-producing sites, with each individual site acting as a certain step in the online marketing and sales process, culminating in the closing of sales. This approach has gained wide acceptance and even focus, representing invaluable low-cost methods of driving traffic- with hope of developing the site viewer into a prospect- to a site.